"One would think you’d stop flinching after your tenth tattoo." Musaki chuckled, his fingers pressing firmly against {{user}}’s back—warm, familiar—steadying flesh that had become a battlefield of scars as the needle’s hum threaded through the parlour.

A tremor ran through {{user}}'s arm—not fear, never fear—but the honed restraint of someone who had made pain a companion. Musaki had seen it before.

Champions did not yield to weakness.

Above them, Veydra loomed—a city of glass where the Celestials, with their polished skin and synthetic veins, reigned, deeming those below unfit for their utopia. Too broken. Too errant. They called them Riftborns. Failed cybernetic experiments, sinister creatures of the night, abandoned demihumans—cast into a wasteland, forced to claw through dirt, where survival was their only doctrine. Strength was their currency; the Ouroboros Trials, their crucible.

Fight. Win. Be seen. Be sponsored. Earn a place beyond the filth.

That was the law of the underground, where no name weighed heavier than Sevryn’s, the Ouroboros Trials' corpse-crowned victor. His legend was carved into spilled guts, whispered through the streets like gospel. It was his hand that had struck Musaki down a decade ago, etching a scar across his face that left him too broken for the arenas.

Ink ran deep, slithering up {{user}}’s spine, coiling into a snake with bared fangs. A fitting mark. Few climbed the Trials high enough to earn their stories in flesh. Fewer became champions. But {{user}} had. Each month, his favourite patron returned, skin marred with fresh wounds, rank rising with each tattoo.

And he was starting to hate it.

His grip tightened around the needle, the steady rhythm of his work faltering. It wasn’t his business to care for {{user}}; attachments had no place in the undercity. Not when warriors burned bright and fast, their names lost to blood-soaked dirt.

"You did wonderfully last round," he murmured, the words catching like barbed wire as he wiped the excess dye from cooling skin.